Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96:459–476 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12362 Death drive, destructive drive and the desobjectalizing function in the analytic process1 Luciane Falcao~ Rua Joao~ Caetano, 497/202, 0470-260, Porto Alegre – [email protected] ‘Without metapsychological speculation and theorizing –I had almost said phantasying—we shall not get another step forward.’ Freud (1937, p. 225) In 1920 Freud hypothesized that there is a death drive whose goal is to return to the previous state, whereas the repetition compulsion is a search for something beyond the pleasure principle. The death drive’s purpose is to combat whatever increases a person’s tension. In its destructive tendency it operates silently. This is a hypothesis, a speculation, which would eventually impinge upon and modify the fundaments of Freudian metapsychology and create innumerous controversies. Freud had found a destructive force in mankind. This destructive force, infiltrating through transference and countertransference, will be capable of hiding the libido’s manifestations, it will impede psychic harmony as well as links between the patient and analyst so as to block the development of the analytic process. These are the manifestations of the return to the previous state, a non-process. They are sometimes experienced silently within the set- ting, other times they are violently discharged in executing acts. Based on Freud’s notion of drive dialectic, Green (1967) proposes study- ing the operations of the psychic apparatus, beginning with the work, move- ment, force and the drive’s interrelationship with the object. In addition to primary decussation [decussation primaire]2, Green introduces the double 1Translated by Arthur Brakel 2Decussation: Green uses the term metaphorically. It comes originally from neurology, meaning a crossed tract of nerve fibers passing between centers on opposite sides of the nervous system. Green pre- sents a definition which is as follows: “In 1967, in my study on primary narcissism, I postulated the exis- tence of primary decussation, where the innermost and the outermost psyche of the subject crossed when exchanging places. The description of such a movement is necessary for understanding projection.” (Andre Green, Key Ideas for a Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Translated by Andrew Weller. London & New York: Routledge 2005, p. 221) Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis 460 L. Falcao~ drive reversal [double retournement pulsionel]3 , which he considers to be the basic model of psychoanalysis. It is during this period that Green proposes the notion of narcissism as a structure: narcissism as the scaffolding [un echafaudage ] on which the psyche will structure itself and develop. As I see it, here we come face-to-face with a fundamental change to the theoretical framework of the death drive. In the dynamism and heterogeneity of the psychic apparatus in Green’s conceptions, the death drive becomes a force that acts to desobjectalize and prevents the psychical constitution of repre- sentational paths. Attack and aggression, which Klein considers as original elements, are secondary elements in Green’s account of the psychic appara- tus. Green extends and reformulates the Freudian theory and includes a new dialectic: life narcissism/death narcissism. This death narcissism is related to the actions of the death drive. The drive movements are present in the dynamics of transference (Green, 1983b) that traverse different ways of using the analytical word (Green, 1983b) to make links. Many analytic thinkers propose similar links: Bion (1959a, 1959b, 1962) proposes reverie and the transformation of beta elements into alpha ele- ments; Winnicott (1969, 1971, 1979, 1988) addresses potential space; the Barangers (M and W, 1966) propose the field [campo]; Widlocher (1996) proposes co-thinking activity—the partial fusion that comes along with primitive identification processes; De M’uzan (1977) proposes chimera; Donnet (2005) describes shared playfulness. Many others will spend endless time on this fundamental aspect of the analytic process. The death drive concept within the Freudian metapsychological edifice In the earliest psychoanalytic references, Adler (1908) presents the idea that there is an autonomous aggressive instinct, which Freud opposes at this time. Freud could not accept the existence of a special drive alongside survival and sexual drive. Some fifteen years later (1923) in a footnote (Freud, 1909, p. 140), Freud finally accepts Adler’s position. In 1911 Spielrein (1981 [1911]), a Russian psychoanalyst, presented a paper to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, entitled ‘Destruction as the cause of coming into being’. In this paper Spielrein maintains that the indi- vidual has a tendency toward self-destruction that is linked to the survival drive itself. This article anticipates the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive. Freud refers to this only once, in a footnote to ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’ (1920, p. 55), when he reflects on sadism. Many psychoanalysts consider there to be three theories concerning drives in Freud: 3Green introduces this notion of double drive reversal as an expansion on Freud’s hypotheses defence, which consists of the drive’s being turned around upon the subject’s own ego and undergoing reversal from activity to passivity. The double drive reversal is dependent on the narcissistic organization of the ego. The notion of the double reversal was introduced and developed for the first time by Green in 1967, in his article Primary narcissism: Structure or state (in Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, 2001a).This notion constitutes ‘‘a basic model of psychoanalysis’’ (Green, 1984,p. 162) and underlies implicitly or explicitly his developments on narcissism, play, the subject of the unconscious, representa- tion and language. Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Death Drive 461 1 The self-preservation drive (Die Psychogene Sehstorung in Psychoanalyti- scher Auffassung, 1910): the so-called ego and sexual drives. 2 The ego libido (connected to the ego, the ego drives and the self-preserva- tion drives—narcissism) and object libido (Freud, 1914b). 3 The life and death drive (Freud 1920). Other authors, such as Denis (1997, 2007), consider four theories in Freud’s work: where the first theory -– introduced in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) - is the one in which the opposition constitutive of psychic movement is made between the sexual drives and the drive for domination, defined as non-sexual. Beyond the pleasure principle (1920): a change in psychoanalytic foundations It would not have been hard for Freud, who had already revised his own theory of drives, to admit the limitations of the pleasure principle, revealed by his clinical material: the presence of the repetition compulsion in many situations and that it was not accounted for by the pleasure principle. This was revealed in: 1 Transference neuroses, where patients repeat painful experiences from their past. 2 Post-traumatic dreams (traumatic neurosis and psychotic states). 3 Children’s games—in fort-da—a ceaseless repetition in an attempt to con- trol the object, transforming passivity to activity. Freud admitted that in the attempt to dominate the object one seeks pleasure in domination; it was not a mere tendency to return. Freud understood that unconscious guilt feelings (even if they can be helped as patients began to get better), masochism and negative therapeutic reactions, could be signs of the presence of aggression in analytic processes: and their presence would impede the positive evolution of these processes. For Freud, these three factors were fundamental in dealing clinically with the death drive. Freud (1914a) had shown that up until then analytic technique had been based on recollection—’the impulsion to remember’ (p. 151). He tied trans- ference to the repetition compulsion and cleared the way for presenting the death drive six years later, and the second structural theory in 1923. He then believed that analytic work and the repressed event are no longer only due to memories: ‘the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out’ (p. 150, italics in the original). The repetition compulsion marks the failure of recollection – the impulse to remember. This transferential shift from narration to acting is for Freud the opening that allows one to understand many phenomena that occur during a session— from the acting out associated with representational content to phenomena we understand today as ‘figurability’ (Botella and Botella, 2007 [2001]), or presentation (Kahn, 2012). Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 462 L. Falcao~ Freud’s 1920 text is complex, at times ambiguous, and is forever subject to different interpretations. It is rich, constituting a point of departure for a fundamental change in Freudian metapsychology: it is a foundation for the second structural theory and has been used to modify understandings of the concepts of masochism, anxiety theory, reflections on destructiveness and civilization—to cite a few. From the first topic, in which pleasure and un- pleasure were related to (economic) increases or decreases in energy, stimu- lation or tension, the pleasure principle was accompanied by reflection on life’s origins, so as to account for the diverse organisations of the psyche— all this can be found in Freud’s Project (1895). Freud introduces the hypothesis that sadism is akin to the death drive: ‘suppose that this sadism is in fact a death drive which [...] now enters the service of the sexual func- tion’ (1920, p. 54). He supports this by invoking the sexual drive’s fusion and diffusion: i.e. the sadistic component of the libido. However, the new goal of this sadistic component led to destruction (Green, 2007a). Aggression did not come from mere frustration of the pleasure principle. There was something demoniacal in its manifestations, and its goal would be destruction—destructive rage. The aggressive drive is present in sadism and masochism. For Freud (1930), however, there could be no death drive without fusion with the life drive.